CSBG Archive

The Abandoned An’ Forsaked – The Little Mermaid is Dead! Or is She?

All throughout December, we will be examining comic book stories and ideas that were not only abandoned, but also had the stories/plots specifically “overturned” by a later writer (as if they were a legal precedent). Click here for an archive of all the previous editions of The Abandoned An’ Forsaked.

Today we examine the rather odd example of the Little Mermaid and her death/life/death.

Enjoy!

During the Breakdowns crossover, some rogue members of the Justice League head to the home of the Global Guardians to investigate a conspiracy involved in an attempted assassination attempt on Maxwell Lord.

In Justice League Europe #30, they show up and discover that most of the Global Guardians were frozen, unable to move…

Jack O’Lantern and Owlwoman (who were part of the conspiracy controlling their teammate) show up and they have a fight with the rogue League members…

Sadly, the Guardian known as Little Mermaid (her name seemed much different before 1989) was killed (Ice is especially sad because she was teammates with the Little Mermaid)…

A few years later, in Justice League Europe #50, the Guardians show up again (again being controlled by the bad guys), only Little Mermiad is with the team!

However, in Justice League Quarterly #17, after a few members of the team died, a statue was put up in tribute of their fallen members, and the statue includes the Little Mermaid…

25 Comments

Fury

chad

interesting that the writers came up with the evil twin to explain how little mermaid when the jl at the time saw her wind up killed by one of the rogue guardians shows up as a member later of the jl and flash just hearing the answer acts like its no big deal.

@Fury: I remember an episode of the Earthworm Jim toon where Jim was blamed for a string of crimes and concluded he must be committing them in his sleep and would have to turn himself in. Peter Puppy kept telling him, “Jim, don’t worry about it, it’s probably just your evil twin! EVERY superhero has one!”

MBloom

Could not possibly agree less. For me the Jones material is the absolute nadir of the Justice League’s entire history – even moreso than the Detroit League, Extreme Justice, and Brad Meltzer – especially his run on JLE. I found the whole run poorly thought out, badly executed, and obnoxiously pretentious.

In any case, by the mid-00s DC seemed to largely operate under the belief that Morrison’s run immediately followed Giffen/DeMatteis, with most of the plot developments and characters from that era totally disregarded (I’m sure Mr. Cronin could easily do one of these Abandoned An’ Forsaked columns on Power Girl’s baby, for example).

Wow, the Gerard Jones bashing is getting surprisingly personal. I didn’t like Jones’s JLE much, but I loved Mosaic and liked his GL stuff in general (more than Marz’s or Johns’s, anyway). The Trouble with Girls was a fun comic too.

Anyway, for the record, the death scene was Giffen/Jones, the “evil twin” comment was solo Jones, and the memorial statue was in a Paul Kupperburg story.